Cop Out
How Law Enforcement Impacts The Heroin Scene

Video Collage with Narration & Music, 2021

George Petros: Words, Pictures, Creation
Robert Lund: Voice, Appearance, Creation, Archive, Music
Rita Andros: Voice, Appearance
Chuck Chains Lenihan: Music

Do you like Heroin? Is it readily available? If not, what replaces it? Dilaudid, Methadone, Oxycontin, or Fentanyl – or all of them together? If you could get legal Heroin, could you function within society? If you were saddled with the inferior substitutes, how long would it be before you OD?

Cop Out asks these questions. While doing so, it presents a gallery of un-artistic, uninspiring anti-drug posters guaranteed to generate smirks by the substance-abusing cognoscenti. It then presents a haunting archive of stamped Heroin bags, rarely seen beyond the street scene. These labels represent actual brand names culled from Pop Culture, including the names of famous people, movies and weapons. The video concludes with a live-stream social media tragedy from a gal who couldn't find the real thing.

Collage of drug-rehab pitches and police activity plucked from cyberspace. Video of narrator walking on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, seen behind the moving array of dope bags, is from a 2000 Discovery Channel feature. The bags, obtained via L.E.S. street purchases by the narrator in the 1980s-90s, move across the screen via Robert Lund's PHP script. Live social-media overdose acted by Rita Andros. Music in the final section is the hymn "Abide With Me" (William H. Monk, 1861), reported to have been played by the ship's band as the Titanic was sinking. Compiled using Final Cut Pro and GarageBand.